Here’s a slight balm for all the bad news about newspapers: websites tied to daily papers rose a collective 10 percent in Q1 to 73.3 million unique visitors, according to the Newspaper Association of America. That’s a little more than 43 percent of all U.S. internet users, the organization estimates, citing Nielsen Online figures.

SEE ALSO: NAA: Newspaper Sites’ Traffic Gained 12.3 Percent In Q1

The NAA slices the figures along a variety of demos in attempt to make the case that online and print are not necessarily opposing forces. For example, NAA claims, using research from Scarborough, that 4 percent of Americans with a post graduate degree have visited a newspaper site in the past week. About 87 percent of the individuals in that group either visited a newspaper website or read a print newspaper in the last seven days. However, NAA doesn’t show how many read a newspaper site only.

Not that cutting the print tie is necessarily a good thing for traffic, at least in the case of the now web-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer. As our Joseph Tartakoff—a former reporter for the Hearst Newspapers property, pointed out earlier, the site has now fallen from Nielsen’s top 30 online newspaper ranking. In March, Nielsen said the number of unique visitors to Seattlepi.com dropped 23 percent to 1.4 million, making it the 32nd largest newspaper website in the U.S.

In the meantime, growth rates for online newspaper traffic appears to be slowing generally. In Q108, the number of uniques grew 12.3 percent. Release